Recycling An Article on Timeboxing Your Project Plan

We’re dedicating our “blogging time” this week to doing some infrastructure upgrades – we have to address some security issues on the site. Until we get through these changes, we’ll be recycling some of our existing content. For our recent readers, it will be “new to you” and for our long time readers, we appreciate your patience. Today we look at one of our most popular articles – on using Timeboxes to manage your project plan.

A timebox is a fixed unit of development capacity. An easy way to visualize a timebox is as a two-dimensional graph. Along the vertical axis is the cost of the development team (per unit time). Along the horizontal axis is time. The longer an iteration is, the wider a timebox is.

The important thing to notice is that with Cost and Time fixed, the capacity of the timebox is fixed. There is only so much that can be accomplished with a given team and a given amount of time.

I was under the impression that a timebox had only its Time component as a fixed value. In some cases, Yes, I agree that Cost may also be fixed however with a flexible cost component there is much more that can be accomplished in the same given amount of time.

Product Management Today

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Who Should Read Tyner Blain?

These articles are written primarily for product managers. Everyone trying to create great products can find something of use to them here. Hopefully they are helping you with thinking, doing, and learning. Welcome aboard!